Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Comparison of Virtual Machine emulators/Hypervisors

Virtualization has really become important during the last few years. It is used for server consolidation, software testing, operating system research, and increasingly, because of the near native performances of the recent virtual machine hypervisors, to integrating operarting systems in a manner that the one which offers best applications for a specific scenario. I for example, use openSUSE 10.2 Linux on my notebook, however sometimes I require MS Office (No disrespect to OpenOffice, OpenOffice is great, and is very funtional but I really love the interface of Office 2007 and makes me feel more productive), thats why I turn my virtual machine of windows on and do my work on it. The software I use is VMware, which is a very user friendly virtual machine software and it also provides near native performance to guest operating systems.

So what solutions for virtualization exist for Linux? I found this mega list in Wikipedia which provides an unscientific comparison between virtual machines. Unscientific because it uses terms such as "Performance is 'near' native", I would like to see benchmarks.

Get the comparison here